The Christmas Child
By Kate Street and Hesba Stretton
3/5
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Reviews for The Christmas Child
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not a bad Christmas story but I would’ve preferred more dialogue exchanges and less rambling third-person narrative. Quite a few times we’re “told” what characters say via reported speech when dialogue would’ve “shown” us what was going on. We also get scenes described rather than dramatized, which makes for a passive narrative.I liked little Joan and sympathised with her during her lonely times.
Book preview
The Christmas Child - Kate Street
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Christmas Child, by Hesba Stretton
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Title: The Christmas Child
Author: Hesba Stretton
Illustrator: K. Street
Release Date: January 27, 2007 [EBook #20453]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTMAS CHILD ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE CHRISTMAS
CHILD
BY
HESBA STRETTON
AUTHOR OF JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER
ILLUSTRATED BY K. STREET
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1909
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Published, September, 1909
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
NATHAN LIGHTED HER STEPS
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Christmas Child
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF JOAN
Along some parts of the coast in South Wales the mountains rise abruptly from the shore, with only a narrow shingle between them and the sea.
High above the coast, however, there are warm, sunny little valleys and dells among the hills, where sheep can find pasture and a fold; and here there are many small farmsteads, surrounded by wild rocks and bleak uplands, where the farmer and his family live with their servants, if they happen to have any, as they used to do in old times, sitting in the same kitchen, and taking their meals together as one household.
Miss Priscilla Parry was the last of three leaseholders of one of these little farms. Her grandfather had enclosed the meadows and the corn-fields from the open mountain, on condition that he should have a lease for three lives from the owner of the land. His own and his son's had been two of the lives, and Priscilla's was the third.
The farm was poor, for the land was hard to cultivate. In every field there were places where the rocks pierced through the scanty soil, and stood out, grey and sharp, amid the grass and the ripening corn. The salt-laden winds and the fogs from the sea swept over them. Miss Priscilla spent no money in draining or manuring them; for was not the lease to pass away when she died, and she was nearly sixty years of age already?
But the sheep and the cows throve wonderfully on the short, sweet herbage they browsed on the mountains; and her butter and cheese, and the mutton she sold to the butchers, were known through all the country. Nobody could produce finer. Every one knew she was saving money up in her little mountain farmstead, and the money was being carefully laid by for Rhoda Parry, the niece she had adopted in her infancy and brought up as her own child.
Miss Priscilla was a spare, hard-featured woman, with a weather-stained face, and hands as horny as a man's with farm-work. Twice a week she wore a bonnet and shawl, when she went to market or church. All other times her head was covered by a cotton hood, which could not be damaged by rain, snow, or wind; and in bad weather she often went about her farm with an old